Raven Industries was my first real industry experience, following my sophomore year of college. It was a summer of firsts as I gained firsthand experience as to how the software development industry operated. I joined Raven's Slingshot team.

While working at Raven, I was primarily responsible for developing a report generation system that streamlined internal processes in - you guessed it - internal report generation. Prior to this project, individuals within the company were often tasked with filtering through a 2,000+ entry Excel spreadsheet to find pertinent data for upcoming meetings, formatting it into a readable report, and then using these handmade reports in their meetings.

Needless to say, this wasn't a great system. Prior to my start date, the Slingshot team took it upon themselves to transfer all of this data into a variety of MySQL tables, allowing me to focus my summer on creating the actual report system that communicated with this database.

So what did the system do?

• Allowed internal teams at Raven to create 600+ page PDF reports in a matter of minutes
• Created a consistent method of report generation, styling, and branding
• Filtering of data based on relationships between components

Lessons Learned

Being that this was my first industry experience, I was a bit clueless when I started. I leaned heavily on my mentor in getting started, and working through my project. I had to quickly realize that this wasn't like the classroom where you could ask as many questions as you wanted, whenever you wanted.

Thus, by far the most important lesson I learned over the summer was, in the words of my mentor, "learning how to learn on my own." By establishing some guidelines on when I would ask for help, and the steps I would take prior, I was forced to do more searching on my own, leading me to (thankfully) become a better problem solver.